Between 2004 and 2007, three important IT or technology disruptions arrived on the scene. First, in 2006, Amazon began offering a very simple flavor of Infrastructure as a service and began their ascent to cloud dominance. In 2004, a company called Salesforce who offered CRM as cloud based software as a Service went public on the stock market and began a meteoric climb to SaaS preeminence. And finally, in 2007, the Apple iPhone was invented and then created a massive cloud infrastructure to support its many iPhone apps like iTunes and iCloud. The cloud was born 15 years ago or more. Instead of jumping on these IT and technology mega-trends at that time, IBM chose to, for the most part, ignore them or just dabble in them.
The chance to transform IBM was then. IBM certainly had the intellectual and financial might to reinvent itself. Instead it chose to protect its legacy computing businesses from mainframe to strategic outsourcing as the cloud threatened them all. It chose to ignore or only pay lips service to this cloud phenomenon and massive disruption until the most recent years. Now IBM has hit the massive cloud iceberg and is taking on water fast.
IBM could have jumped into this emerging Cloud market 15 years ago or even 10 years ago and embraced it to be a visionary company in Cloud. It just couldn't or didn't want to see the big picture of disruption that was to happen. IBM didn't want to change. Now it may be too late to catch up. And now IBM must resort to relentless layoffs, reorgs, offshoring, and desperate overpaid acquisitions to try and save itself.